Tag Archives: culture

The war was not just about people getting killed and hurt, it was also about how brother fought against brother, and how families and relatives were split and bitterly divided. The women did not have much say in what happened. It was the men who got into fights and arguments and fought against one another. Often we did not understand what the problem was but we had to play along. When the men were away, most of us got along fine.

Your father and your maternal grandfather were in opposing parties. We lived one roughly hundred steps apart but during the war we felt like we were worlds apart. We did not even acknowledge one another when our paths crossed. We did not use the village water-spring at the same time, and avoided interaction. Your mother could not visit her siblings and parents, and your aunt could not visit us. It was terrible. Khaag da sar azu roza kina.

In early spring one year, your maternal grandfather slaughtered a sheep and threw feast for the villagers. This was a few months before you were born. Given your mother’s pregnancy and the rarity of good food in the village, I expected them to send over some for your mother. They did not send any. The guests and villagers walked by our house, ate in the feast, and walked back. We were not invited. Late in the evening there was a knock on the door. I opened the door and found Aabay Saifulla and your aunt at the door with food in their hands. They said they had waited for your grandfather to go to the mosque for prayers before secretly making their way to our house to bring some food.

On another day I was at my paternal home in Geru for my elder brother’s funeral. Aatay Shukrullah’s older brother was also there along with other villagers. He was with the Mullahs and he had a beef against your father. He greeted everyone else at the home but not to me. He walked right past me. At the end of the prayer service that day, he consoled my sister but walked out straight past me.

Years after we became refugees, all the people who had fought against us and forced us out, visited us and stayed at our home on one occasion or another. We look past what had happened but we could not forget about it.

A husband and wife in Baderzar took their little daughter to the mountains, and kept her in a cave. They took food and other things for her in that cave but they kept her hidden from the eyes of the other villagers.

I do not know how long this went on for before she was discovered by a shepherd. The villagers then found out, and soon this news spread to the kharijis working in Sangemasha. The came to the village, and went to the cave where the girl was being kept by her parents. They found out that she had leprosy. The khariji took her to Sangemasha, and then to Karachi in Pakistan for treatment.

People say she received treatment for years in Karachi, and she was cured. In Karachi she met and married another leprosy sufferer from Jaghori. They settled and became rich. The girl’s parents tried to contact her but she kept them out of her life.

Leprosy was the big terror of our days. People thought leprosy sufferers were cursed. They hid the victims or took them to the mountains where they often died and were eaten by wolves, bears and jackals. People who contracted leprosy were considered cursed, their families were cursed, and their villages were cursed. It was terrifying.

When the khariji doctors first started visiting villages to treat people, some villagers pelted rocks at them, and chased them out of their villages because they did not want others to find out.

The kharijis stayed in Sangemasha for many years and visited all the villages to treat people. They saved many people, and removed the terror of leprosy from our lives.

Chadar, Chadari and Hijab came to us from Kabul and Iran. Our people did not know the idea of women covering their hair and face. We had our own way of doing things, dressing up, and beliefs.

In my days and the days before me, the girls and boys wore caps – colourful caps, with topug at the front, and colourful threaded braids hanging from the sides. The family sewed up one for every child every few years, and the girls wore theirs until they were married, and thereafter they wore the cap and covered it with colourful scarf and jewellery.

Photo by Basir Seerat or Najibullah Musafer

Women worked on the farm, looked after the family, looked after cattle, did the work, while the men sipped tea and lazied in the shade in summers and in the sun in winters. Women sewed those caps and clothes and the topug and the braids and the designs. The men wore caps of different colours and had bright colourful topug. Your uncle wore one as a kid, and another when he grew up a little. We made one for your father. It was an essential part of the clothing. Men wore the cap, boys wore the cap, girls wore the cap, and women wore the cap and a once married, put a fabric on the top.

When the first men returned from Kabul, and Iran and Najaf, they brought back other ideas. They brought back chadar and chadari and black veilsand white caps, and in my lifetime the colours, and the colourful dresses and colourful caps slowly faded away.

*topug = popping on the side of caps made from threads
*chadar = long scarf
*chadari = full veil usually worn in Afghanistan and Pakistan

We had been led to believe that musicians, singers were bastards; and those who listen to music were destined to have molten lead poured into their ears on the day of judgment. Unlike you guys, we couldn’t listen to music at any time or any day. The elders and the mullahs decreed that music an affront to god, and an instrument of the devil. They said the devil created music to distract the believers from prayers, and instigate corruption. Most people treated music and artists with disgust. You lot listen to music the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Such is your life.

Many years ago, at Aabay Saifulla’s wedding, the village mullahs prohibited music, encouraged chants of Salawat, segregated men and women. That whole wedding looked like a funeral. Your father’s rebellion in the face of the village meant that we were banished from the village and kept out of the wedding. Your mother, Aabay Saifullah’s own sister, wasn’t invited. I and my youngest daughter, Aabay Wahida sat by the front window, longing and looking, as the wedding procession approached our house, walked past it, and walked away towards the pass and beyond, without taking a second look at us, one of their own. I could hear them from across the pass, chanting Durood and Salawat, and then, those sounds too, dimmed and disappeared. The aftermath of the wedding procession too, felt like the aftermath of a funeral – eerie silence and dejection everywhere, as if, as if something had died in the village.

Months went by, and we put that behind us. Your father’s cousin, Mohammad Hussain of Geru, came to your father to borrow money to pay his wedding. He did. He returned later to ask for his gun, to carry it on his shoulder, as a groom on a horseback. But come the day of the wedding, neither your father, nor our family were invited to the wedding. The three families who weren’t in the commander’s party, were left out – our family, the family from Qolbili, and Doctor Saraw’s family. The rest of the village got together and celebrated.

In the year before that, me neice, Aatay Rasheed’s daughter, was being wedded off to Thayna Jaar village. The groom’s family sought the permission of the bride’s father to play some music, and beat drums in front of the main procession. He nodded. No sooner had the music begun playing that loud screams and condemnation made their way to the front. The mullahs pushed their way in and out. The screamed at the youth at the front, scolded them, and called them awful awful things. I think one of those mullahs was my nephew, Baseer, the idiot mullah now based in Iran. He snatched the cassette player and raised it to smash it unless the music was stopped.

The village elders held him back but the music died there. There was more Salawat, no music, now laughter, no joy, no songs of wedding, but prayers and salawat. I still don’t know why the people were so stupid. But as soon as the procession reached the the pass, it was a different territory. Your father ran to the front, did a loud ‘AAHOOOYE!’, began waving jacket in one hand, and danced. The children, and young boys joined him. This was rebellion. This made the mullahs so made, but it made us all so happy.

Once upon a day, a long time ago, we all sat outside basking in the rare winter sunshine. I was young, and on that I must have been playing in the dirt with my sister.

It was mid-day and in that soothing sunshine, only the occasional sound of the breeze, birds or cattle broke the silence. Then, we heard a faint noise of something rolling, something similar to a chunk of rock rolling down the hills, or the seasonal flood making its way down the valley or, as we came to know later, a car approaching from a distance. Although back then, the roads approaching the village were too narrow and rugged for cars or other machines. Khayra! As we sat there, the faint noise grew louder, and my father, every so protective of his family, grew more anxious. He began scanning the hills.

“Ohooye!”, he yelled.

He stood up, turned towards us, and told all of us to quickly go inside. We became nervous, and quickly rushed inside. My mother peeked out of the open door but father wasn’t going to have any of it. He pushed her in, and closed the door.

The noise grew very loud but sounded as if it was from very far away. Father placed his hand above his eyes, and from the shade of his hand, looked up at the sky. From the front window, we looked up in the same direction as he did. There was a dot in the sky. That dot was making the noise. It moved slowly across the sky and after a few moments, we could not see it from the window anymore. Father’s eyes followed the dot.

The noise then returned to being faint. It grew fainter, and slowly faded away. We understood that with the disappearance of the noise, the dot in the sky too, had disappeared. We waited in silence.

We returned to the sunshine. Father looked anxious but back in his seat in the Sun. He said it was a “jaaz”. He said it must have been sent by the horrid and cruel King. We all wondered what horror was to follow.

God knows where it was going or where it had come from. We had never seen one before. Some men from the village came to my father that day. They talked about it. The women talked about it. The people were scared. Others too, had hidden their women and children inside after hearing the noise and seeing the dot in the sky. They had anticipated something terrible to happen.

That ‘jaaz’, the dot in the sky, was a plane. We had never seen one before.
*Khayra = Anyways